Absurdities of Olympic proportions!

A GROUP of Olympic officials appears to have splashed an exorbitant £44,600 ($65,960) on a slap-up business lunch - including a £19,000 bottle of cognac - in an upmarket London restaurant, based on reports circulating on the internet.
An image has been put online purporting to show a receipt from the China Tang restaurant at the Dorchester Hotel in exclusive Mayfair.

The receipt was posted on social media site Reddit by a user who claimed to know a worker at an unnamed restaurant.

The $28,000 bottle of cognac ordered with lunch.

The poster wrote: ‘‘My friend’s a waiter and this is a receipt for an official lunch for 15 Olympic Bosses in London. Now we see where all the money’s going.’‘

The Daily Mail carried a report about the apparent lunch but did not say when the lunch was supposedly held or if the lunchers were from the International Olympic Committee or officials from one particular country.
American news site Gawker suggested the receipt was from China Tang because it has £19,000 bottles of Hennessy 1853 cognac in its cellar.

Also listed on the receipt were modest food orders ranging from £15 for servings of spiced chicken and £7 sorbet platters.
China Tang declined to comment when contacted by the Daily Mail, while calls to the organising committee went unanswered.

Wow that is wild!!! $4k+ service charge too, ouch!!!

Italian athletes are given $128,000 for winning a gold medal (the highest of all country incentives from a their local IOC), USA $25,000 (as a more reasonable example of what other country IOC’s award their athletes).
Brits? Have to pay $4K in taxes and get $0 from their local IOC’s!

My daughter is getting an education is IOC politics and the unimportance of Olympic results in a athletes career. Especially with all our lack of gold in events we have world champs in.

From a comment I made on fb when asked;
“Whats your opinion of “amateurs” representing amongst the greats?” in regard to Niger rower Hamadu Djibo Issaka
Before the last few decades the Olympics where only for amateurs, professionals could not compete. It’s the amateurs that try harder, run faster (than they normally would) and raise the bar higher for the common man. It’s their efforts that us, as humans are inspired by to go further. The “greats” aren’t that great really, most don’t present the Olympic ideals - they move the bar by cm’s. People like Hamadu Djibo Issaka are the essence of reaching Faster, Higher, Stronger and raise the bar by Olympic proportions by going beyond their natural environment, comfort zone or normal ability.

At the end of the day the Olympic ideals are kept somewhat true, although it’s the messiness of sponsorship dollars that interferes with integrity that will always hamper sporting purism.

By Tony Walker - from the Australian Financial Review:

Olympic gold at any cost – just don’t mention Montreal

What price gold? Medals, that is. At current rates of return on investment at the London Olympic Games it is costing the long-suffering Australian taxpayer a minimum $588 million for each gold medal won, on the basis that at the time of writing our single gold was gained in the women’s 4?x?100 metre swimming relay.

That figure relates to federal funding over a four-year cycle since the Beijing Olympics in 2008 and does not take account of resources devoted to sport at the state and provincial level.

The best projections now have Australia’s Olympic team coming home with a maximum of 10 gold medals. This would equate to $60?million a medal, compared with about $40 million in Beijing in 2008, and far short of optimistic projections by Australian sports chieftains this time around.

Australia’s haul of 16 gold medals at the Sydney Olympics in 2000 may well prove a high-water mark.

Australian sports writers in London are a merciless lot – just ask James Magnussen and Leisel Jones – and are already writing about a “gold medal drought”.

You can sense the word Montreal – when not a single gold was harvested – dripping off the pages of Australia’s newspapers and, worse, this is all happening in London, home of our traditional Olympic Games adversaries.

If there has been a benchmark for Australian sport over the years it has been how well – or badly – Australia’s elite athletes have performed against our British counterparts.

James Connor, a sports researcher at the University of NSW in Canberra, reckons you could inflate the $588 million figure by a factor of five to arrive at all the resources devoted to sport at various levels of?government, much of it focused on producing elite athletes for Olympic fodder.

Connor questions the emphasis on the medals table at the expense of recreational programs designed to improve the overall fitness of the community.

“Half a billion dollars is a fair chunk of money to be spending on something ill-defined called national pride,’’ he says.

It might seem churlish to write this while the national mood hovers between pride and humiliation, but it may be time to reassess the costs and benefits of taxpayer investment in sporting achievement along the lines recommended by businessman David Crawford in his review of funding in 2009.

In the review, Crawford called for a rationalisation of federal and state sporting institutes to make better use of resources and focus on those sports with most medal potential.

Those recommendations drew a strong reaction from Australian Olympic Committee chief John Coates, who warned that targeted funding would cost medals across all sports and risk a repeat of the “shame” of Montreal – a place that might be likened to the Dardanelles in Australia’s sporting lexicon.

Montreal spawned the Australian Institute of Sport and a funding model that prevails more or less to this day, with funds distributed through the Australian Sports Commission within the portfolio of Health and Ageing.

In the 2011-12 federal budget $268.7?million was allocated to the ASC, of which $171 million went to elite sport, designed to improve the country’s gold medal prospects.

The Institute of Public Affairs in a 2006 IPA Review? article had a point when it nominated the Montreal debacle and its aftermath as one of Australia’s 13 biggest mistakes, along with the release of cane toads in 1935 and the invention of Canberra in 1908. Whether the shadow of Montreal falls once again across the Australian sporting landscape depends on the performance in London. It is not looking good.

These moments, in any case, provide an opportunity to take stock of national priorities. For example, are students at the Australian Institute of Sport treated in the same way as trainee nurses or student teachers? The short answer is “no’’ in the sense that the former are not obliged to pay HECS or other fees.

A useful contribution to the overall debate comes in a Goldman Sachs research paper, The Olympics and Economics 2012, which reports a generally positive impact of the Olympics for host countries on their housing, foreign exchange and equities markets, with greater benefits accruing to emerging economies.

But when it comes to Australia – taking into account an economic, political and institutional environment that affects productivity performance and growth across countries in the so-called growth environment score (GES) – Goldman Sachs’ forecasting has almost certainly overstated our gold medal potential.

The Goldman Sachs survey had Australia fifth on its gold medal table – with a score of 15, based on the country’s GES – behind the US, China, Great Britain and Russia.

Like the missile himself, Goldman appears to have misfired. These are not happy days.

We should prepare for another inquiry and calls for additional funding. For a politician in search of a photo opportunity, what’s $100?million a medal?

- Tony Walker is the Financial Review’s international editor.

You have to feel bad for this poor bloke from the country of St Kitts and Nevis (yeah, I’d never heard of it either):

Kim Collins is a former world champion sprinter, and his coach also happens to be his wife. His coach/wife wasn’t staying with him in the athlete’s village, and apparently he broke ‘the rules’ by visiting her. Anyway, this was enough for his country’s Olympic Committee to ban him from running just hours before his race!!! His post on Facebook says it all:

NZ forgot to register shot putter

NEW Zealand remembered everything for its champion shot putter- except one crucial thing.

Kiwi Valerie Adams was supposed to step up to the plate and launch perhaps the shot of her career. She’d go for gold. Loud cheers would fill the stadium.

But that didn’t happen There was no cheering. Because the New Zealand Olympic committee forgot to register her.

You read that right: they FORGOT to sign her up.

Her name was missing from the starting list, but it wasn’t a total disaster - her name will be on the start list tomorrow.

Thank god the IOC didn’t penalise Adams for the NZ committee’s mistake.

“Valerie Adams has been added to the start list of the Olympic shot put competition tomorrow after an administrative error saw her name missed from the initial line up,” the NZOC said in a statement.

“The matter was dealt with swiftly and has been fully resolved. The IAAF have confirmed her name is on the list.”

Yahoo in the US labelled the error “egregious”. It’s hard to argue with that.

NEW Zealand remembered everything for its champion shot putter- except one crucial thing.

Kiwi Valerie Adams was supposed to step up to the plate and launch perhaps the shot of her career. She’d go for gold. Loud cheers would fill the stadium.

But that didn’t happen There was no cheering. Because the New Zealand Olympic committee forgot to register her.

You read that right: they FORGOT to sign her up.

Her name was missing from the starting list, but it wasn’t a total disaster - her name will be on the start list tomorrow.

Thank god the IOC didn’t penalise Adams for the NZ committee’s mistake.

“Valerie Adams has been added to the start list of the Olympic shot put competition tomorrow after an administrative error saw her name missed from the initial line up,” the NZOC said in a statement.

“The matter was dealt with swiftly and has been fully resolved. The IAAF have confirmed her name is on the list.”

that was posted yesterday

Ha! That’ll learn me.

Anyone else notice the “Applause” sign on the triathlon course that lights up when athletes ride/run past?

Cop exercising his special ‘Olympic’ powers during the Games. Pulled over in London because he had no front number plate. Holds up traffic.

Cop = wanker.